On March 16, 2026, the U.S. House passed a bill written by Utah Congresswoman Celeste Maloy. It took forty minutes of debate and a voice vote — no roll call, no record of who was for it.

Three days later, a resort developer who needed that bill gave $15,500 to a fundraising committee set up in Maloy's name. The next day he gave $4,500 more.

He had already given her campaign $10,500 in December.

Total: $30,500 from one man — the managing partner of the company that wants to build a 1,250-acre golf resort on the Shivwits Band of Paiutes reservation, and that needs Maloy's bill to do it on the terms it wants.

What the bill actually does

The Shivwits Band of Paiutes Jurisdictional Clarity Act sounds like housekeeping. It isn't.

It does two things:

• It moves lawsuits off the reservation and into Utah state court. Any civil case involving the Shivwits Band that arises on the band's trust land now goes to state court instead of tribal court. The bill spells out that disputes over any contract or lease count as civil cases — so a fight between the band and a developer gets decided by a state judge, not a tribal one.
• It lets the band sign leases for up to 99 years. That's not a lease. That's four generations.

Maloy introduced it on April 29, 2025. It sat in the Natural Resources Committee — a committee she sits on — until January 2026, then moved to the floor and passed by voice vote in March. It's now in the Senate Indian Affairs Committee, where an identical bill from Utah Sen. John Curtis has already had a hearing.

Who needed it

In October 2025, Shivwits Band leaders announced a joint venture with Reef Capital Partners, the developer behind the Black Desert Resort in nearby Ivins. The plan: three 18-hole golf courses, a practice course, a hotel, a sports complex, restaurants, cabins, and more, spread across 1,250 acres of reservation land west of St. George.

Patrick Manning is Reef Capital's managing partner and the developer of Black Desert Resort. He is also the man who wrote the $30,500 in checks.

Manning has been open about why the bill matters to him. He told KSL it gives "clearer legal certainty around civil matters tied to agreements on Shivwits lands," and that "that kind of certainty can support responsible investment and long-term planning."

That's the honest version. A company building a resort on tribal land wants to know that if the deal goes bad, it can sue in a court it understands, under rules it knows — not in the tribe's own court.

The bill delivers exactly that. And the man who wanted it delivered $30,500.

The timing is the story

Campaign money to a member of Congress isn't unusual. The calendar here is what makes it hard to look at.

All of it is on the record at the Federal Election Commission, filed under Manning's name with his employer listed as Reef Capital Partners and his city as St. George. Team Celeste is a joint fundraising committee — a vehicle that lets one donor write a much bigger check than the law allows for a campaign account alone.

$20,000 of the $30,500 arrived in the four days after the House passed his bill.

The band is split, and the people who lost are the ones who live there

Maloy's defense is that she was doing what the tribe asked. "This legislation is the result of those conversations and reflects the solutions the tribe believes will help them move forward while serving their members," she said in a statement on the House floor. The elected Shivwits Band Council backs the bill, saying it "supports self-determination and sovereignty" and helps "remove uncertainty that can discourage responsible investment."

But the band is not of one mind, and the people objecting are band members.

Mary Snow, a band member who runs a group called Red Mountain Land Preservers, laid out the mechanism plainly to KSL:

"In order for big companies to have businesses on federal land, those businesses don't want to have to go through tribal court. So they come with their deals and their agreements, and part of that agreement is you give up sovereignty, which is the protection of the federal government. Then they take you to state court and you lose sovereignty to that land."

She also pointed out what a 99-year lease means in practice: "They're telling us that we don't have to go up to 99 years, but the thing is, that once this development is built, it's not going anywhere."

Other band members have said the project would sit on ground they consider sacred. Land resource manager Lawrence Snow told St. George News that Red Mountain is "a spiritual place. That's where the spirits go." Elder Joel Bushhead put it harder: "They stabbed us in the back. For their money."

Members told that paper the deal was announced on October 3 with almost no advance notice to the community, that they raised objections in council meetings and weren't heard, and that the lease agreement itself was never made available for them to read.

And then there's the water

Southern Utah is in an emergency drought. Gov. Spencer Cox declared one after a record-low snowpack. In the middle of that, the plan is three golf courses in the desert.

Opponents inside the band argue the resort would soak up all or most of the band's water rights, leaving nothing for anything the Shivwits might want to build for themselves later. Band leadership says there's enough water. Nobody disputes that a 99-year lease locks in whichever answer turns out to be wrong.

This is the same move, over and over

Maloy's whole record in Congress runs one direction on land. She pushed to sell more than 10,000 acres of Utah public land as an amendment to Trump's budget bill. She sponsored a bill to strip presidents of the power to create national monuments. And in July 2026 she stood next to Trump as he cut nearly 3 million acres out of Bears Ears and Grand Staircase-Escalante, then said she wanted Congress to make the cuts permanent. The League of Conservation Voters scores her at 3% for 2025 and 5% for her career.

She is not the only Republican writing law about Native land while Native constituents object. In Alaska, delegates at the Alaska Federation of Natives convention voted to formally oppose a bill written by their own congressman — who said he was only asking for feedback.

The bottom line

Nobody has shown that Celeste Maloy traded a bill for a check, and she says she wrote the bill because tribal leaders asked her to.

Here is what is on the record anyway. She sponsored a bill that moves tribal court cases into state court and unlocks 99-year leases. A developer needed both of those things to build a resort on that land. That developer's managing partner gave her and her PAC $30,500 — with $20,000 of it landing in the three days after the House passed the bill.

If you are the band member who stood up in a council meeting and got told no, you don't need a prosecutor to tell you what that looks like. And the bill is still moving. It's in the Senate now.

Source

• Celeste Maloy faces questions over donations from developer backing proposed Shivwits golf resort — The Salt Lake Tribune, June 16, 2026
• House passes bill for Shivwits Band's 99-year land lease with Black Desert Resort — KSL, March 18, 2026